IDC maps out successful print services strategies for vendors in the region

Research firm IDC has announced that 2014 will be a pivotal year to drive market expansion into the broader customer segment as well as for revenue growth for the print services market in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ).

“IDC sees fundamental transformation taking place from both vendors' offerings and customer expectations in the MPS market,” says Jessie Lee, Research Manager for IPDS Research at IDC Asia/Pacific.

Source: IDC

“Future success in the MPS market will come as a result of tapping into new opportunities by providing ‘best-in-class’ services and expanding to ‘sweet-spots’ across the Enterprise to Mid-market segment. 

"In 2014, both quality (securing renewals and developing best practices) and penetration (channel programmes and developing new logos) will have significant impact on the MPS market, based on the maturity of vendors and the country.”

According to IDC, this strategy will be critical for vendors to sustain customer value, provide differentiation, secure renewals and generate best practices.

Vendors will use MPS to drive more transformative opportunities revolving around digital capture, workflows, cloud integration and mobile printing enablement. IDC expects greater integration with IT services and business process outsourcing engagements and a growing focus on vertical and line-of-business solutions.

Customers, particularly large enterprises in maturing economies, are taking a holistic approach that factors MPS into the workspace strategy and ensures that it is tied to the mobility, cloud, social business and big data analytics agenda. This trend will become more prevalent as enterprise businesses plan productive and innovative workspaces for employees. 

IDC has named Australia as the most mature market with over 30% market share in APeJ. Vertically, Financial Services and Manufacturing are leading, while Education is gaining momentum.
 
IDC predicts that the Enterprise segment, defined as the segment combining Very Large Businesses with  over 1,000 staff, as well as Large Businesses with 500 to 999 employees, will be the initial segment to drive MPS. The Mid-market segment, comprising Medium Businesses with 100 to 499 workers, also bears watching as they tend to make decisions more quickly and have fewer objections to outsourcing services.

By 2017 the print services market in APeJ will cross the US$6 billion mark, IDC predicts. In 2014, IDC expects businesses to further fine-tune their customer-targeting strategies in accordance with specific customer requirements. Large companies will require a ‘best-in-class’ experience with customisation and seem to be more open to the transition to solutions leveraging IT trends such as cloud, mobility, social and big data. 

Vendors will need to analyse target customers and invest direct sales and service resources to drive revenues mainstream.

In the Mid-market, there is growth potential but extensive customer coverage and low ROI on direct resources are pain-points for vendors. In view of the business momentum in the indirect channel segment, IDC expects channel partners including resellers, system integrators, and vertical influencers to be a crucial part of the ecosystem in reaching out to the more lucrative MPS/BPS business in the Mid-market.

Determining the success of channel MPS/BPS will heavily depend on sophisticated programme designs (examples include margin analysis, resource readiness, target horizontal/vertical segmentation, split of R&R, training, and lead generation by co-marketing) to avoid channel conflict scenarios and to generate more partners in the MPS/BPS ecosystem.